The most common snow removal devices found in automobiles are simple hand-held devices having a scraper blade and/or brush on one or both ends of the handle. Generally, the hand-held devices tend to require a great deal of effort and are extremely slow in removing frost and snow, especially when the snow has hardened. To make it a little easier to remove frost and ice, heating devices generally comprising of an electrical coil, and battery to power the heater element, have been disclosed. The heating devices are of only slightly greater efficiency, since their power output is low and it takes a long time to melt the snow on the window pane or windshield. These have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,973,294—“Heated windshield scraper device” awarded to Michael Schatt et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,357,646—“Heated ice scraper” awarded to David Kim, U.S. Pat. No. 4,930,176—“Combination heated scraper and brush” awarded to Gideon Gelman and U.S. Pat. No. 6,969,828—“Ice scraper” awarded to William J. Deane III et al. Because the power output of the heater is limited while the heat required to melt snow on the windshield is large, the task of removing snow from a windshield is still likely to take a considerable amount of time.
To overcome the above limitations, David Weissberger obtained a patent with U.S. Pat. No. 3,935,425 for a “Mechanized electrically heated windshield cleaner”. In this, the scraper head is moved back and forth in a straight line by a motor. At the same time, the tip of the scraper is heated using a heating element. Though this is a much better solution than the ones cited above, it also suffers from certain drawbacks. First, since it takes a relatively long time to melt snow, the heating element is ineffective. Second, since the scraper head does not have a guide, optimal scraping angle and pressure cannot be applied to the scraper head for it to do a good job. Third, since the scraper blade is not enclosed, it is not safe to work with an exposed blade. Fourth, the back and forth motion is not very efficient since the blade tip goes from zero velocity to a maximum velocity and back to zero velocity before changing its direction of movement. Fifth, to transfer a rotational motion of the motor to linear motion, a few linkages have to be used which increases the cost of manufacture. Sixth, since it has only one blade to scrape frost and snow off, it will be less efficient than a unit with multiple scraping blades.